Ooops! I did it again....
It's always nice to see an old game be potentially brought back from the dead. The slight problem with this is that most game companies seem to insist on rebooting the game into a generic genre that will potentially sell more copies . For example, most franchise reboots are brought back as FPS games as that's supposedly where the money is.
Where the developers fail though is people don't tend to like the change or new direction. Below are a couple of examples of games rebooted, some you may actually like, but sales figures or press coverage show a different story. Now there are so many examples of games to pick for this topic so I may revisit it another time but I'll just pick a few for now.
Bionic Commando (Multi-Format)
The reboot is not the biggest departure from the series idea. After all you still have the grappling arm. For some reason they added a really terrible story and just a plain unlikeable main character. They should have just stuck with the cheese from the original game or hell even the remake of the 2D game.
The 3D reboot was also very misleading the environments were not as vast or rich as they appeared as straying too far from the linear path would flag up a warning sign telling you to turn back or die or radiation. There was also this serious back story about the main characters wife which made very little sense... SPOILER:
The bionic arm was the main characters wife somehow, because that makes sense....Ummm NO! The reboot received average reception from gamers and a bit of a pasting from the critics and was not the success Capcom wanted.
Syndicate (Multi-Format)
So yeah go from one of the most in depth team based strategy games on PC and even Mega Drive, to a dumbed down shooter.
This was quite a sad sight to see since I loved the original, especially since plenty could have been done with this series even if they did to go for the lazy shooter route.
The Single player is just a plain old shooter which does not require that much thought and with similar themed games on the market (cough, Deus Ex) this just didn't stand out. The multiplayer was a co-op step in the right direction, but unless you had four decent players it was incredibly difficult. Damn you EA, this is what happens when you dumb games down... you loose those sales.
Maybe had they stuck to the original formula we could have had more games in the franchise and be enjoying games in this series to this day!
X-Com: The Bureau (Multi-Format)
Now I'm not talking about the X-Com: Enemy Unknown game. That game received a lot of praise and was considered quite the gem, it's also proof that other game genres do sell as opposed to shooters.
I'm referring to the game announced before that that was originally titled X-Com and was going to be a first person shooter. The years passed and it was never released (X-Com: Enemy Unknown was developed, released and enjoyed by gamers right now and this game still has not seen the light of day).
The project was then remodelled and the game was changed to a third person squad based shooter now called The Bureau: X-com declassified. The final title turned out to be an un-inspiring shooter that suffered from terrible story telling and simple game breaking moments of sound synch issues and story elements that simply did not make any kind of common sense. Surfice it to say it bombed at retail and reviewers did not jump for joy either, yet another example of messing with a classic to produce a bad game......Urghhh!
Jamalais Final Thoughts...
It's almost like the Publishers don't even play games anymore, sometimes you have to wonder exactly how the meeting went for all 3 of the games mentioned above.
Who was it that sat down and thought Syndicate or indeed any of these classic franchises would work as a Shooter? Seriously who are these people and how on earth do they still get to keep making games. Surely if you hold the rights to a franchise you would at the very least try to recapture the greatness one more time and tug on the heart strings of the people who loved them the first time round, they are after all the intended customers for the reboot.
I love it when rubbish games don't sell, the games industry is full of bad games designers the same way every industry has terrible companies or people working in them, these fools have to be made to go away and leave our beloved retro games the hell alone.
Jamalais